In this room across the hall there was much that would have repaid research on the part of Oswald. The room was a joint room only when Joan and Peter were without guests in the house. Whenever there were guests, whether they were women or men, Joan turned out and the room became a refuge or rendezvous for Peter. It was therefore rather Peter’s than Joan’s. Here as in most things it was Peter’s habit to prevail over Joan. But she had her rights; she had had a voice in the room’s decoration, a share in its disorder. The upper bookshelves to the right of the fireplace were hers and the wall next to that. Against this stood her bureau, locked and secure, over and against Peter’s bureau. Oswald had given them these writing desks three Christmases ago. But the mess on the table under the window was Peter’s, and Peter had more than his fair share of the walls. The stuffed birds and animals and a row of sculls were the result of a “Mooseum” phase of Peter’s when he was fourteen. The water-colour pictures were Peter’s. The hearthrug was the lion-skin that Peter still believed had been brought for him from Nairobi by Oswald.
Peter could caricature, and his best efforts were framed here; his style was a deliberate compliment to the incomparable Max. He had been very successful twice in bringing out the latent fierceness of Joan; one not ungraceful effort was called “The Scalp Dance,” the other, less pleasing to its subject, represented Joan in full face with her hands behind her back and her feet apart, “Telling the Whole Troof.” Joan, alas! had no corresponding skill for a retort, but she had framed an enlargement of a happy snap-shot of Peter on the garden wall. She had stood below and held her camera up so that Peter’s boots and legs were immense and his head dwindled to nothing in perspective. So seen, he became an embodiment of masculine brutality. The legend was, “The Camera can Detect what our Eyes Cannot.”
One corner of this room was occupied by a pianola piano and a large untidy collection of classical music rolls; right and left of the fireplace the bookshelves bore an assortment of such literature as appealed in those days to animated youth, classics of every period from Plato to Shaw, and such moderns as Compton Mackenzie, Masefield, Gilbert Cannan and Ezra Pound. Back numbers of _The Freewoman_, _The New Age_, _The New Statesman_, and _The Poetry Review_ mingled on the lowest shelf. There was a neat row of philosophical textbooks in the Joan section; Joan for no particular reason was taking the moral science tripos; and a microscope stood on Peter’s table, for he was biological....